Why Are You A Montreal Expos Fan?

Well, someone has to...

Whenever someone finds out I'm an Expos fan, the immediate follow up question is always "Why?" So that became my answer. How do you easily defend a team that never won anything and moved away from it's city because of horrible ownership after the strike tore the heart out of the franchise. One time, many years ago, my knee-jerk response to the "why" question was met with a comment about how soul crushing 1994 was... Now there's a person who gets it!


But I doubt he flies multiple Expos flags in his living room...

My first introduction to baseball came during the Minnesota Twins 1987 World Series run. That winter, I got the complete 1987 Topps baseball card set (one of tens of millions). Breaking all collector code, I cracked that baby open and immediately sorted it into team sets, then studied the backs of each card to learn the players. Who was good, who was bad, overrated, underrated... But one thing immediately struck... Montreal had some weird looking uniforms...


Wait...  Pete Rose was an Expo???

In 1989, I had cable TV piped into Basement World, and now had nearly every Braves and Cubs game available via TBS and WGN. (It's no wonder the Braves and Cubs have so many nationwide fans...) I quickly became a fan of National League baseball because those games were on more often than Twins games were. And I like watching the pitcher bat.


I distinctly remember watching a Braves game on TBS from Montreal when I noticed that Olympic Stadium was comprised of only primary and secondary colors. Not shades of them either. Dale Mohorcic was pitching for Montreal, and the Braves batters kept fouling off pitches to all areas of the stadium. Everything was either bright fake green, bright fake blue, bright fake yellow or bright fake red, cast against dingy grey... Even the Metrodome and it's infinite blandness had some shades of it's primary and secondary colors. Given the stadium itself looking like a giant toilet, it had to become my favorite just for being such a strange atmosphere for baseball. This wasn't indoor Twins baseball, this was almost indoor cartoon baseball. I had to see this place in person!


At a card show in 1992, I bought a 4" x 6" matted print of Olympic Stadium by Barry Howe. This picture hung in Basement World, Kenyon and my current residence.

The Minnesota Twins had just won 2 World Series in 5 years, but I was uninterested... By early 1992, the Expos supplanted the Twins as my favorite team.


In 1991, I'd gotten a subscription to Baseball America, expanding my resources to follow the game far greater than the local papers and scattered coverage on ESPN. I started following the top minor league prospects around the league, and quickly found organizations I predicted to grow into dominant teams in the next few seasons.

Sadly, I have to admit the New York Yankees were at the top of that list, with their impressive roster of prospects developed in the early 1990's. (You know the names that succeeded... Later, I'm planning to highlight some of the names that didn't...)

The second place team on that list was the Montreal Expos. The 1990 season featured a trio of young stars in Larry Walker, Marquis Grissom and Delino DeShields arrive in Montreal, with more on the way and future MLB All Stars coming into the organization via recent drafts, Montreal was going to be a very interesting team in the 1990's.

If only they could have kept this guy...

Minnesota didn't rank near as high on my list due to recent poor drafts and the long time inability to develop reliable pitching.


Of course all of this took place between 1989 and 1992, the prime time of the Junk Wax Era. I bought a lot of cards. Way too many cards... That card collection started to favor Yankees, Expos, Twins and to a lesser degree the Seattle Mariners (because of Ken Griffey Jr.), and the New York Mets (because of Jeff Innis). I started trying to get rid of the other teams I didn't like. (Like the Atlanta Braves and Boston Red Sox...)


Montreal's first round draft pick in 1992, BJ Wallace. He never made the majors much to my dismay. I wanted an Expos jersey of a legit Wallace that played for the team. Wallace Johnson was close, but not close enough...


To oversimplify things, how did my predictions turn out? The Yankees became the team of the 1990's, winning the World Series in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000. The Twins? After competing until 1993, they embarked on a series of losing seasons to round out the 1990's, marred by poor drafts and their inability to develop reliable pitching.

The Expos?

That's nowhere near as easy a question to answer...



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